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Summer Cyrillic Challenge | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| 236factorial Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6389 days ago 192 posts - 213 votes  Speaks: Mandarin, English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 42 27 May 2011 at 11:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's finally time to learn a language that doesn't use the Roman alphabet. The only language I know that doesn't use the ABC's is Mandarin, and that came almost for free (at least the speaking and listening part; I still have enormous trouble writing it). I also tried Japanese not too long ago and it was far too difficult for the time being.
Why Russian? There's so many languages with non-romanized writing systems. There's no concrete reason for studying Russian. I don't know too much about the culture (although Russian composers: Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov: they're so great!), and I study science and mathematics, so there's no direct application of the language. Very few of my friends speak Russian at all, and I don't have romantic interests in any Russian speaking females. It's just a curiosity, a whimsical decision. And somehow, I'm incredibly motivated to learn a random language. Brief description of myself? The non-language stuff, that is. University student. Chinese-American. I study chemistry and math, with a touch of economics. I like to run, swim, play piano, compose, and do logic puzzles. Past language experience? I speak English natively, and Mandarin at home with my parents. While I have tried teaching myself reading and writing in Chinese occasionally (after learning with my parents half-heartedly for a few years), I have never gotten over 1000 characters because of time constraints. Hopefully that will change someday. I took Spanish in school, although I also studied it independently a bit because I got really impatient with the curriculum. Seven years of Spanish, and present tense conjugations are still fuzzy to some. Ugh. I studied French completely on my own starting in 8th grade (about 5 years ago) through FSI, and am quite content with the level I've reached, even if I don't really learn much French anymore with college classes and all. Since the French adventure, I've been rather quiet about languages; I've had numerous large academic commitments over the summers that have prevented me from sitting down and studying a language seriously and intensively. I tried a month of Japanese last summer, motivated by a nice free trip to Japan (for academic purposes again), but that didn't go anywhere, obviously. Parameters of study? The intensive study will take place this summer, from mid May to late August (so yes, I've started, but I haven't gotten to write this log until now). This gives me 100 days to gain some command of Russian. Unfortunately, I cannot devote my full time to it because I'll also be doing full-time research for about 10 weeks, grading for an online honors school in the remaining weeks, doing some distance running training (maybe a 20k coming up!), writing a short musical (harder than it looks...), and practicing plenty of Chopin for upcoming fall events. It seems impossible to fit in any studying time, but trust me, I've started already and it works. I devote 3-4 hours per day. Usually, I space out my studying because after two hours of continuous study, I become transparent to information. Materials? I will be using the Princeton Russian course, which I've had on my computer for 4 years, strangely. Perhaps I was paranoid that such a nice program would be taken down someday. To supplement, I will be finding some reading/listening material. However, I don't see many defects of the Princeton course so far, so I may not need to turn to too many supplements until later. I need to find some good readers, however, since Russian novels are far too difficult. In any case, I think that some authentic materials would be nice, which is a change for me because I've been almost exclusively focused on structured courses to learn languages in the past. I plan to get through about two lessons per day of the course. They're short lessons, so it's possible to get through one in 1-2 hours and retain everything quite well. Goals? I would really like to not be intimidated by those Cyrillic letters. A few months of part-time study won't get me especially far, but I hope to progress through the equivalent of 3 semesters of a university level course. I may continue to take it in the fall, for credit, but this is subject to the intensity of my other courses. I have a killer schedule set up already. How often will I update this log? About twice to three times a week, at least. In the next few days, I will summarize what happened in the first two weeks of study (I have it written down, actually), and go from there. Also, I wrote this entire introduction in 20 minutes, so there may be important details about background, methodology, etc. that I missed. I'll fill in necessary information as it arises. Parting comments I'm so excited! Happy reading! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| akprocks Senior Member United States Joined 5135 days ago 178 posts - 258 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 2 of 42 28 May 2011 at 1:04am | IP Logged | ||
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You might like http://ikindalikelanguages.com/labs/courses.php?id=14. It's a fairly good program that I used to teach myself Cyrillic.
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| 236factorial Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6389 days ago 192 posts - 213 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 42 29 May 2011 at 3:33am | IP Logged | ||
That's a neat website! I love the humorous teaching style. On a similar note, do you know any sites that teach Russian cursive? Also, is there non-cursive Russian handwriting? Is it the same as the computer-printed letters? Anyway, this is a synopsis of my first few days of Russian study: First week I: Alphabet, greetings, and pronunciation Princeton lessons: 1-5 (5/11-13) After the first dialogue, I was shocked at how many consonants the language allowed in succession. For the first 10 minutes or so, I could barely imitate anything correctly because the speakers were rather quick, and some of the sounds were strange. Also, the romanized phonetic script (since the alphabet had not been presented yet) threw me off because some of the letters were not being pronounced as written. I would learn later that this was because of vowel reduction and soft consonants. At that time, I just accepted the inconsistencies as facts and moved on. The Cyrillic alphabet was surprisingly straightforward to learn, although not as easy to write (it took me a while to figure out how to write ж efficiently). Despite my efforts, I still tend to read "р" as the English /p/ sound, rather than the rolled /r/. I remembered the л as the "pi with a tail", although I don't know how that has anything to do with the /l/ sound it makes. I couldn't (and really still can't) tell whether I was pronouncing the soft consonants correctly. I feel that I'm close to the recording, but I can't see how Russians find so much difference between the hard and soft consonants. In fast speech, I would never be able to tell the two apart. Then again, Americans probably feel the same about Mandarin tones at first... Most of the first few lessons dealt with the pronunciation, and were not too hard to get through. There was also an introduction to possessives (and how they change a million ways depending on gender, number, etc.), and a brief interlude about the "это" construction. First week II: A few conjugations, weird spelling rules, and vowel reduction Princeton lessons 6-11, 5/14-17 The title says it all, pretty much. I finally mastered the "ugly" /i/ sound (ы)! Also, I was experimenting with the Russian keyboard, and found it completely different from US keyboards. This was a little inconvenient because I don't have Russian letter stickers and it took me forever to find letters. So, I usually don't type Russian (there's really no reason to either). At the end of the first week, I had about 120 words in my vocab and could speak some basic sentences, and I knew the alphabet. However, I still couldn't say "I speak Russian", so it's nowhere near basic competency. In my outside life: spring semester classes just finished, and everything is a mess in my room (unorganized dorm stuff dumped onto the floor). I settled down and visited some friends, but mostly just enjoying my life without classes. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 236factorial Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6389 days ago 192 posts - 213 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 42 30 May 2011 at 10:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Second Week: Plurals, Present/past tense, какой, and relative clauses
This was a LOT of material all into one chapter. I don't know how the Princeton kids do it with all their other classes, but I found learning the different verb forms and exceptions to be rather difficult. However, with harder lessons came faster improvement. I could finally say "I speak Russian" and I learned a lot of common verbs. The fact that there are 3 genders in Russian really makes conjugations more complicated, since adjectives now have more conjugations to learn. However, there seems to be ways to predict gender for almost all nouns, which is a blessing compared to Spanish (mano? mapa? capital?). Another problem: I'm not sure if it's just speaking speed, but certain pairs of adjective endings, such as -ая/-ое and -ий/-ие sound very similar, especially when unstressed. Perhaps it's my ear, but I can't imitate differences that I can't hear. I always try to enunciate the endings, as un-Russian as that may be... One noticeable feature of the course is that it avoids using infinitives; they write verb stems and then present a few rules of how they react to different tense endings. For example, instead of жить, they write жив+ to highlight the present tense conjugations; the past tense can also be predicted because one adds л, ла, etc. and since л and в are both consonants, the л pushes the в away (it's pretty humorously explained in the course). It's really helpful for verbs like пить, which they write as пьй+/пи+ to show how the verb changes stem in different tenses. They also have accents and x's written on top of stems to show where stress changes occur. It's a pretty complete and clever system. The next entry will catch up to where I am right now. Then I'll be posting live updates from there on. Edited by 236factorial on 30 May 2011 at 10:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 236factorial Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6389 days ago 192 posts - 213 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 5 of 42 02 June 2011 at 4:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Week 3: Accusative Case
So the annoying part of Russian begins: noun declensions! Luckily, I studied Latin grammar for 3 hours (hmm...) before, so I have a faint idea of what all the syntax jargon means. Having to conjugate both the adjective and the noun (as well as the verb!) will definitely be an intellectual adventure. This week, I also was introduced to the if...then structure, and I was rather impressed at how straightfoward it was. After using Если бы... бы, the verbs are in the past tense in both clauses! No more conditional tense! (But I imagine that Russian has a conditional tense. What if it's not an "if" clause?) Each lesson takes about 80-120 minutes now: 30-50 minutes for the dialogue, 20-40 minutes for grammar exercises, and 30 minutes for the written homework. Occasionally I will repeat exercises from previous lessons, either as review or a warm-up. I also make vocabulary flashcards (like always). By spending about 3-4 hours per day, I can usually get through two lessons with little problem, but my brain doesn't accept any more information after that. Even though I have more time, I can't study much more than I do right now. Edited by 236factorial on 02 June 2011 at 4:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 236factorial Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6389 days ago 192 posts - 213 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 42 06 June 2011 at 3:48am | IP Logged | ||
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Fourth Week I: Genitive Case
Princeton lessons 34-40 This must be when Russian gets fun. I could never have imagined how many strange ways a word can be transformed, and trying to juggle three cases is difficult. The rules get even more confusing when considering that masculine animate nouns are conjugated in the Genitive case even when they function in the Accusative. Adjectives conjugate too in different ways than nouns, which makes everything worse. At least I can say that someone has something now, using constructions like "у меня..." I don't know how much practice I'll need before I'll be able to use the Genitive case confidently. Edited by 236factorial on 06 June 2011 at 3:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 236factorial Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6389 days ago 192 posts - 213 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 42 10 June 2011 at 3:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Fourth Week II: Too many cases
Princeton lessons: 41-45, Sara story 3-4 This new unit introduced yet another case: the prepositional. I'm getting quite lost in the middle of all the rules of word formation, and sometimes the rules seem completely arbitrary: for example, saying that you're in Moscow and that you're going to Moscow requires two different cases of "Москва" (prepositional and accusative, respectively). Saying 41, 43, and 45 trains requires three different forms of "поезд" (nominative sing., genitive sing., genitive plural). Adjectives follow a wholly different set of endings and don't always match the case of the noun either, which makes things worse. These rules aren't terribly difficult to remember, but using them in conversation without pausing for 5 seconds seems more difficult than I think. I plan on constant revision and practice, and I hope that the case system will become somewhat natural to me as I spend more time on it. I'm thankful, however, that Russian numbers are not highly unusual; besides the fact that "thousand" (="тысяча") also changes endings depending on how many thousands you have, everything else is more-or-less simple. While not as simple as Mandarin, at least Russian avoids the odd French system (like 92 = 4 20's [and] 12). I've also acquired a phonetic keyboard for typing Russian, which makes life MUCH easier. The standard Russian layout was just too different and I don't really have the time or patience to become proficient (I've forgotten how long it took me to master the QWERTY keyboard...and that was for my native language English!). In other news, a gigantic thunderstorm knocked out my Internet yesterday for most of the evening, so I was pretty much stuck with learning Russian since all the sound files are saved on my hard drive, and all the PDFs are printed out! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4905 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 8 of 42 10 June 2011 at 3:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Russsian numbers will give you a lot of difficulties. They are incomparatively more
complex than French. We don't conjugate nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numbers, but decline them. The term conjugation is refered only to verbs. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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